James Croak - Hardcover

Drawing connections between the jagged trajectory of Croak's alternately operatic and frozen figures and the histories that they allude to, both social and art historical, is a difficult task managed well by McEvilley. His essay could serve as a model of how to place contemporary art within larger historical contexts without boxing it in to ill-fitting aesthetic considerations. Although McEvilley does occasionally sacrifice some of the probing spirit and dark humor of Croak's pieces, this seems to be unavoidable in order to make the valuable points that he does. McEvilley takes the different worlds of Croak's sculpture and resolves them i! nto an evolving stream of ideas, always linked to external references which anchor them and argue for a status quo that is open to the evolving critique, and the change, of additional transformation." -- excerpt fr. Sculpture magazine, by Tom Csaszar, Oct, 1999

This is a beautifully designed book with great color reproductions that captures the nuances of James Croak's sculpture of dirt. The book follows his 20 year career with a look at a few of his large metal minimalist works of the early to mid 70's, his L.A. transition into figuration creating assemblages of mix-match taxidermy and found objects, to the most famous of his sculptures of the 80's, "Dirt Man" and Dirt Baby series. The book finishes with last year's dirt sculpture in a historical context while Barbara J. Bloemink's interview gives you insight into his life and the reasons for making the sculptures he does. -- Robert Curcio - Cover Magazine

Thomas McEvilley's James Croak revisits one of the wilder West Coast artists of the past two decades, somebody who, like the Sots artists revisits the past of the culture for the sake of critiquing it. In 1982, Croak's "New Myths and Heroic Metaphors" series featured a full-sized Pegasus, a stuffed horse with feathered wings bursting through the roof of a customized '63 Chevy. Croak went on to create shuffling men sculptured from compressed, cast dirt, as well as a series of latex "New Skins for the Coming Monstrosities" that evoked all our uncertainties about the body and the need for protection from outside and inside forces. Easily one of least classifiable artists of the moment, Croak is easier to love at some of his artist moments than others, but the sheer quantity of serious weirdness-or weird seriousness-latent in his work makes this one of the more strangely appealing books of the moment, even without McEvilley's characteristically instructive placement of the artist in the eddying sidestreams of postmodernist sensibility. -- Jerry Cullum, Art Papers Magazine, September, 1999